5 Years of Banjo Tablature

I’ve recently realized that I’ve just completed five consecutive years of writing at least one banjo tab per week. I’ve published 200 of them in four books and am about to put out Book #5. It prompted me to wonder just why I was doing it and am seemingly unable to stop. There are just so many great tunes… At first they were tunes I knew from having learned them at festivals, jams, camps and so on. For a while i was really listening to recordings of banjo players -both commercial recordings and my own hand-held collections. Somewhere along the line I started only listening to fiddlers. I realized that was because it seemed to be the purest form of the melody. Mostly I’ve been listening to source recordings because for this giant repertoire of tunes the older recordings somehow revealed the real idiosyncrasies of what makes each tune or rendition unique. For a brief period I was writing tabs that had almost every note that the fiddle was playing. Big mistake- fun but big mistake. One long time student threatened to quit because the tabs were too difficult to play and even if you learned them they just had no groove. I’ve since shifted my approach to that of trying to imagine what I would play if I could climb into Mr. Peabody’s Time Machine and sit down with Ed Haley, John Salyer, Emmett Lundy, Luther Strong, Edden Hammons and on and on. So I’m now trying still to understand these tunes better (a process which I’m sure is unending). I’ve found a relational database that I can put on my phone that can aggregate some of the info that swirls around the creation and promulgation of these wonderful melodies. I’ve found that so many tunes are icebergs of information- just the tip peeks out of the water with the name of the tune. Below the waterline lurks a mountain of information consisting of facts, rumors, tall tales, historical references, alternate titles, family history, urban legends, travelogues and the like. The next thing I’m looking at is how the mountain geography and the direction of the rivers help determine how a tune (or parts of a tune) travels.